Metadata: About Substack
Is it worth taking a stand here?
Two of my favorite journalists, Casey Newton and Molly White, recently moved off of Substack. Since I am also on Substack, I’m trying to figure out what this means for this newsletter. Here are my thoughts at the moment; please tell me yours in the comments.
Some context
Like all online platforms, Substack hosts a bunch of content that I disagree with. This spans the whole magnitude-of-disagreement spectrum, from "has a bit too much faith in the free market" to "explicitly advocates global genocide"!
All platforms draw a line somewhere on that spectrum about what sort of content they allow1. These lines are always blurry; that's why most companies have some sort of Trust & Safety team to adjudicate2. The nature of the platform partially determines where I think that line should fall; I’m fine with overt Nazis having internet access3, but I'm not OK with them having YouTube channels. Substack, thanks to its recommendation engine, feels more like the latter than the former.
To Substack's credit, when Casey asked them about six obviously awful accounts, Substack quickly banned five of them. But they also made it very clear that going forward, users would be responsible for reporting these. They plan to make zero effort to detect these sorts of accounts on their own. To me, this feels like a very low bar, and Substack has chosen not to invest the resources to clear it.
Does it make sense for me to leave?
My situation is rather different than Casey’s and Molly’s. Their publications are much bigger; Casey has 170,000 free subscribers to my 100. Importantly, they also have paid subscribers, and Substack collects 10% of that revenue. Since I have no paid subscribers, Substack is losing (a marginal amount of) money with this newsletter. On the other hand, I’m also driving (a marginal amount of) traffic to their other newsletters.
I would not describe Substack’s behavior on this matter as atrocious. They banned the obvious drivel when it was reported. Twitter is probably worse, and 4chan is definitely worse. But I’m not really on Twitter or 4chan, and both Facebook and Google (not exactly bastions of morality) do better.
If I leave, I’ll probably move to Ghost4. They promised Casey they will do a bit more than Substack:
[Ghost’s] terms of service ban content that “is violent or threatening or promotes violence or actions that are threatening to any other person.” Ghost founder and CEO John O’Nolan committed to us that Ghost’s hosted service will remove pro-Nazi content, full stop.
Migrating would be a hassle, but not as painful as it was for Casey/Molly since they had to deal with payments.
But I’d like to hear from readers about this, too. Are you comfortable reading a newsletter hosted on Substack? Would this deter you from paying for this newsletter, if that became an option? Is there something I’m missing in my reasoning? Let me know in the comments, in the Slack community, or via email.
Update [2024-01-24]
I wanted to close the loop on this. Ultimately, it doesn't look like it's currently worth the costs to make this migration.
This is frankly quite painful for me. We rarely encounter moral choices in our day-to-day, so it feels bad to take the easy way out on this one. But like all decisions, I have to consider the tradeoffs:
Substack's product is, as far as I can tell, the best for what I want: a newsletter that looks good without my making any design choices, with support for footnotes, images, and subtitles. Ghost, Wordpress, beehiiv each fail one or more of these tests.
Reader opinion was generally mixed and mild. Unsurprisingly, most of you fall roughly where I do: migrating feels right, but this isn't an important issue. There are a few outliers in both directions.
If one of these things changes, I'll reassess. As always, thanks for all your input5!
Even Twitter!
Even Twitter! It's just one guy, though.
I’d even go a step further than that: I'm reluctantly OK with overt Nazis having Gmail accounts!
They’re following the Wordpress monetization model: publishing a free, open-source library anyone can use, and then offering a paid hosted service for people who don’t want to run servers.
Even the stuff I disagree with vociferously.